:: THE HISTORY OF LA USINA

In the world today, according to the UN, more than 600 million people (approximately 10% of the global population), live with a type of disability. Of these people, 400 million (over two-thirds) live in developing countries. Only 2% of children with disabilities in the developing world receive some form of education or rehabilitation. Around the world, the link between poverty, social exclusion, and disability is strong and direct.

In Argentina, 2.2 million people live with a disability, according to the latest INDEC (National Statistics Institute) census in November 2004. This figure indicates that in one in five homes lives someone with a disability. These estimates impact, socio-economically speaking, over 8.8 million Argentines. Moreover, 9.9% of the argentine population is older than 65 and more susceptible to a disability, therefore increasing the estimates significantly.

La Usina is a non-profit organization founded in 2002 thanks to a group of citizens – with and without disabilities – devoted to promoting awareness and visibility of people with disabilities in the community.

We are guided by respect for diversity as a decisive value in cultivating good citizenship: we believe in the possibility of building a community with differences but without inequality.
We propose to introduce the issue of disabilities to non-traditional spaces to make it a part of life, but as a part of reality distanced from the concept of “special,” because we are all special and different.

The founder of La Usina, Bea Pellizzari, survived a serious car accident 20 years ago, and was fortunate enough to complete rehabilitation and raise a family.

Convinced that many people are not granted the same opportunities, Bea decided to study and specialize in Disability as well as Management of Social Organizations. She has since dedicated 13 years of her life to promote the quality of life and civil participation of people with disabilities.

It was during these years that Bea began to consider creating an organization to promote the full citizenship of people with disabilities through diversity.

Because of her work in Disability, Bea is a Social Entrepreneur of Ashoka, a worldwide network that distinguishes and supports people with clear ethical values, proven yet innovative ideas, and a strong passion to transform their communities.

At La Usina, we base our work from an entirely innovative –for our country- point of view. We assume a challenge much greater than welfare and philantropic policies; we aim to create a collective conscience and a change in personal conduct, thus allowing for the full individual development of people with disabilities in our society.

It was in this context that Bea called together a group of people from diverse backgrounds that shared the same views, and together they defined their vision: To live in a community where people with disabilities exercise their human rights, while being valued and respected through their diversity. And La Usina was born. The mission, at that point, was to promote a higher quality of life, autonomy, and participation of people with disabilities, in order to build a society amongst all and for all.

Today, La Usina uses two strategies to accomplish its mission:
For the Strategy of Supporting Social Organizations, we offer consultation and advice for organizations that work with and for people with disabilities, to strengthen their work and increase their daily results.

With our Civil Responsibility Strategy, we seek a change in attitude towards people with disabilities in order to create responsible and solidarity-based daily conducts.

It was not “a magical moment”, creating a project to accomplish “the change in disability.” It is important to note that at our Usina, we spent the entire first year understanding the realities of the Disability sector, investigating and calculating the problems, reaching a consensus on our mission statement, finding volunteers, establishing our goals and objectives, defining our internal organization, and generating the necessary resources to run an organization. Our founders invested a lot during that time. They framed everything on the first lesson: to enter a process of construction, that allowed us to focus on the work and especially to optimize the use of our resources in every way, not just the materials, but the time, talent, equipment, and contacts.

The main challenge we undertook was to strengthen the entire field of disabilities through organizations we are in contact with throughout the country, and to transform the community as a whole by advocating diversity as a form of cultural enrichment.

We are proud to have far-ranging influence from our headquarters in Buenos Aires, the city-capital of our country: we put a lot of energy into establishing relations with institutions in the provinces that provide services to citizens with disabilities, because often the informational, educational, organizational, and technological resources are based in Buenos Aires, and don´t reach other regions of Argentina. We use a strategy of regional work, in association with other local organizations of and for people with disabilities, which we call “strategic partners.”

We who work at La Usina understand that our role – like any non-profit organization that uses private resources for public issues – is not to assume the Government’s work (who is responsible, through their strategic decisions regarding budget distribution and public policies, for the equiparation in the situation of disadvantage that people with disabilities face in Argentina).

In times of economic depression, as recently experienced in Argentine society, the daily necessities of people with disabilities become daily challenges, and the situation is much worse for people with disabilities living in poverty.

At La Usina, we strive for long-term change, through daily action, to improve the living conditions of more than two million citizens who are our neighbors and that, in many cases, remain invisible to the communities in which they live.

At the end of 2005, we analyzed our progress over the previous three years to see how the seed we planted had grown. From our analysis, we decided to reformulate the mission of La Usina to: Promote a change in attitude towards people with disabilities by creating awareness and promoting an active citizenship.

As writer Eduardo Galeano once said, “We are what we do, to change who we are” and it is by this principle that La Usina was founded.
We invite you to join us.